Cheeky

Wait what's the deal with the horses? I want to feel good about myself today.

Edit: Wow, those bastards have it rough.

Their genetics have sacrificed nearly every aspect of basic resiliency for maximum speed on the plains. Most of the work caring for horses is keeping them from accidentally killing themselves. Full disclosure: I worked as a stable hand as a child in exchange for riding lessons. Will never ever own a horse.
- What preditor was so fast horses had to evolve to that extent??
- Same for rabbits. The are basically as much lean muscle that can fit on the lighest possible skeleton.
  If you pick up a rabbit wrong, they can snap their own back with the momentum from kicking their back legs.
- I did this too and will also never own a horse lmao. This is why horse people are weird.
- Basically a 900LB Cocker Spaniel that's afraid of it's own farts and will eventually kill every single tree within reach. I also will never own horses.
Sometimes they will die because they can’t puke. Also broken legs are usually fatal even with vet care.
- To add on why broken legs are fatal: its because horses are so big, that even with a sling, they cannot support themselves well on 3 legs. And lying down is also not an option as their own weight will crush their internal organs if they stay down for too long.
The term healthy as a horse is mostly survivorship bias
- From what i read here there's no unhealthy horse, it's either healthy or dead.
They only have 4 toes total.
- And they run around at 60mph on the tips of their toenails.
- Humans have multiple toes because our ape ancestors used their toes like fingers. Having multiple, separate toes is probably bad for survival unless you're using toes to manipulate tools.
  Animals that have distinct toes include apes, geckos, mice, raccoons and similar animals which need them to grip onto surfaces or to manipulate things. There are predators which have separate toes because they're a place to mount claws: eagles, cats, etc. There are animals that have separate toes with webbing between for swimming. But, for a lot of animals, separate toes aren't really useful, so they've evolved away: elephants, rhinos, giraffes, horses, cows, etc.
The term healthy as a horse is mostly survivorship bias

Tbf, our teeth aren't bad. They just didn't evolve to consume so much sugar.

From an evolutionary standpoint we just have to survive long enough to reproduce, if we can't eat past age of reproduction there's no evolutionary pressure to change that.
Thank goodness for modern dentistry.
- That’s completely untrue.
  Evolution applies to the entire lifespan — if we could “reproduce” but died in childbirth every time, our species would have gone extinct long ago.
  Parents and grandparents also contribute greatly to the success of a child long long after they’re born, helping to ensure it also survives to reproductive age.
- Generally sure. We've certainly evolved to want to be around for a while after reproduction though, for example human infants are completely worthless. That doesn't mean we need to be top notch, but we do need to exist sufficiently to get children to even the most brutal, basic independence.
  Compare that to something that hatches then is already just adulting, like many reptiles.
  I think the keyword is precocial vs altricial
They just didn’t evolve to consume so much sugar.
Bro, eating oranges puts our tooth enamel in a weakened state. If we were designed, it was by an idiot.
- Oranges do not naturally have that much sugar.
Actually a bigger contributor is underdeveloped jaws due to no longer requiring to chew from.a very young age for nutritional requirements.
- Why would stronger Jaws prevent teeth decay?
Half our expected lifetime was our expected lifetime back when they evolved. Teeth are doing quite well, all things considered.

The breathing and eating tubes gotta cross so you can blow with your mouth and choke on cock. Non-negotiable.

You could still probably blow with your mouth if you didn't have your lungs connected, I imagine it would involve a kind of burping type of action. I think the bigger problem would be that if your nostrils closed up, you wouldn't be able to breathe, and probably also talking would be a lot harder if your vocal chords and mouth were separate from your main air sacs.
I think the solution is probably just an easily opened and closed internal valve that separates the stomach and the lungs, rather than this bullshit we currently have with two separate valves that lead into both and open for one and then close for the other whenever it's required. It's still good to be able to close both when you want to, but you can already close your mouth on command, and another valve with the nose is a notable upgrade in that it keeps everyone from smelling bad smells they don't wanna smell, and it also doesn't take any more valves than we already have.
There's probably some way you could fix this all with enough surgical intervention, I bet...

Its only a valve. Topologically speaking, the passage from the mouth to the anus only constitutes one hole.

The passage of air into the lungs is not a hole however, that is a cavity. Same difference with the vagina, that's not a hole, that's a cavity.

People are donuts!
- No, since you have a nose. Topologically, people have 3 holes.
- Mmm
Depends on the state of your esophagus, doesn't it? If it's closed (which it mostly is) then your mouth and nose holes go to your lung cavity. Your anus is also part of a cavity that goes through your intestines all the way up your throat and stops at your esophagus.

tbf horses have big dicks, it could have been worse for them

You stand on your toenails
- Both valid points. I will still need some time to take this all into consideration.
- Right, but literal horsecock
It is, they have hooves.
how much bigger is domesticated horse dick than wild

Dolphins probably lament not being able to make milk come out of their buddy's nose by making them laugh while drinking.

A horse is just an intense desire to die on four legs.

The teeth thing is just because of our high sugar, high grain diet

The first* people with bad dental health were Egyptians as they lived on bread (which packs your teeth and feeds the bacteria that ferment it and make acid) before that, and until the invention spread, people died of old age with all their teeth intact

I eat very low carb - almost entirely meat due to allergies, and haven't had a cavity since I started doing that, despite me nearly never brushing or flossing my teeth

*There were also people who lived in the tropics and ate a lot of fruit, and those with sugar cane.

You never brush your teeth? It's not only good for health dude
Brush your teeth bud. People can probably smell your breath from a mile away.
- You'd think. But where does the bad smell come from?
  My understanding is it's from overactive bacteria; I don't feed my mouth bacteria with food that makes them smell
  At least my partner still kisses me
- brushing your teeth doesnt do much for bad breath. You want to clean the rest of your mouth to get rid of that, which is probably what they do.
I thought Egyptians had bad teeth because their flour was ground with sandstone, leaving sand in their bread. They ground their teeth into nothing by eating sand.
- I feel like the sand thing was a guess by people who couldn't pick why ancient Egyptians had worse teeth than everyone else in the ancient world
  If there's sand in your food you notice and it feels bad. It's not something that makes you go "oh well I'll just keep chomping" and that would wear teeth down, not give them abscesses
- this is also common with older bread. Another reason why it's bad, it's probably both though.
Similar. I don't eat low carbs, just almost no bread, and my teeth never get cavities
- Yeah but that can also be because of genetics. I eat bread everyday and still never had a cavity
- I note that birds, which evolved eating grains, don't have teeth
Teeth can need work from physical trauma, too. Getting hit in the head while hunting or fighting or just hiking might cause a cracked tooth, which can be deadly in the absence of dental care. Or just while eating, sometimes a stray rock or bone fragment or shell might cause an issue.
Lots of other species can regrow teeth in adulthood, even a handful of other mammals. All sorts of animals can have tooth problems in the wild, so I wouldn't assume that prehistoric humans were exempt from that general danger.
- Sure. All sorts of things would kill you, and a dental injury would be a crap way to die. The ancient stuff is from preserved hunter gatherer skeletons.
  We, fortunately, have excellent dental care available so people hardly ever die of a broken tooth, I know about my lack of cavities from a pair of several x-rays and a check up while replacing a filling from when I ate the common diet
Yeeeah but they also only lived to like 30.
- Those low life expectancies are typically due to high infant deaths. Once you are like 10 or so, the life expectancy is much higher, and more informative. The life expectancy at birth is in many cases a bit misleading.

THE APPENDIX HAS ENTERED THE CHAT.

Being able to make our own Vitamin C aside, the fact that a vestigial organ can randomly decide to fucking kill you is asinine from a design perspective. Its the equivalent to building a pool in the sims and removing the ladder for the first person who wanders inside.

It's not totally vestigial, it helps regulate colon bacteria. People without their appendix take longer to recover from diarrhea, which is important when bad water and spoiled food are a more regular part of your life.
- Citation please ?, I want to know more.

I am 99% sure humans are supposed to have tails

I sure as hell am supposed to. A big, floofy one.
- Ah yes, you are indeed one of my kind.
Tails aren't particularly common on great apes
- Guess it doesn't make sense to call them great, then.
  Large apes maybe.
- That's cap as hell considering a saiyan without a tail can't become a Great Ape or an SSJ4 for that matter.

Could be worse:

We don't have cloacas.

Idk, shitting an egg/baby sounds a lot better than present human childbirth..
- I don’t disagree, but being egg bound sounds about as bad as dying in childbirth.
We're not that efficient yet.

Look up the recurrent laryngeal nerve.

I did, for the lazy
Your point ? I didn't go deep, but nothing jumps out at me.
- "Evidence of evolution
  The extreme detour of the recurrent laryngeal nerves, about 4.6 metres (15 ft) in the case of giraffes,[32]: 74–75 is cited as evidence of evolution, as opposed to intelligent design. The nerve's route would have been direct in the fish-like ancestors of modern tetrapods, traveling from the brain, past the heart, to the gills (as it does in modern fish). Over the course of evolution, as the neck extended and the heart became lower in the body, the laryngeal nerve remained in its original course."
  I think this is what he was getting at
So it loops around the aorta. That’s weird, but is it a problem?
- It's a perfect example of non-intelligent design and evidence of evolution.
- high ping to your larynx, basically

Horses not breathing while running opened a whole new world of anxiety for me.

What?!
- They don't aspirate when they run, their organs slosh around and just sort of push their lungs enough to keep them alive.

I always thought the fact that turning our heads too fast can give us strokes was rather inconvenient.

Yikes. That’s why I get a little worried about the high velocity neck stuff that some chiropractors do.
Or that sneesing / trying to hold back a sneeze can give you an aneurism. But I guess although it's rare in animals it's not exclusive to humans.
- Waiting both sneezing or trying to hold back is dangerous? What are we supposed to do half-ass it?
- Rupture an existing one, right?

imagine having a stuffy nose and you can't breathe with your mouth.

wait yeah no we wouldnt be able to play like, any wind instruments, traditionally at least.
- As much as I'd advocate for a professional rectal woodwind orchestra, I can't help but feel we wouldn't have invented the instruments in the first place.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nose_flute

the lack of a highly clickable abstract and title that ignores the last names of many of the people involved leads me to believe this is a satire

Horses were at least marginally less ridiculous before people got involved. Not quite to the same extent as dogs, but compare a steppe horse with a thoroughbred and you'll see that they're smaller and hardier. Much better equipped to live, slightly less able to carry fully armored people on their back.

We're God's creation but God is a lazy kid that rushed the science project for the whole semester in six days and barely half assed it hoping no one digs too deep into it

as long as you ditch the whole "omniscient and omnipotent" part, god is pretty relatable.
i'd like to see you do better when you're literally creating the fucking universe on your own.
- Well let me pull out of the drawer my really dusty degree in Biology and let's see.
  First of all, do I still have to follow the principles of Embriology or do I get to make it from scratch? Because that's where I reckon most of the problems that came up come from

I feel like feet and ankles have a lot of responsibility. I had a really bad case of plantar fasciitis for like 2 years and it sucked. Every step you take was a stabbing pain

That's really just a modern problem. If you were part of a tribe walking out of Africa, you'd never have that problem. Our feet are pretty impressive actually

What use is grief to a horse?